Victoria’s Secret doesn’t just want to sell you a bra this Valentine’s Day—it wants to sell you an escape hatch from a world that feels a little too difficult. CEO Hillary Super argues that after years of cultural heaviness, the lingerie giant is finding its footing again by leaning back into glamour, glitter, and unapologetic fantasy—this time on women’s terms.
Super, the first woman to run the company in its current form, is blunt about how flat things had gotten. For years, Victoria’s Secret tried to outrun its legacy of hyper‑narrow beauty standards with cautious rebrands and empowerment slogans that critics derided as box‑checking. The brand stopped bragging about what it did well—like bra fittings—and dialed down the theatrics that once made it appointment viewing. “We were living in a beige world for a while,” she reflects in her downtown Manhattan office, where Victoria’s Secret’s maximalism is reflected in nearby leopard-print lingerie.
Super is the former CEO of Anthropologie, where she saw beige and gray take over home interiors. Victoria’s Secret’s hottest competitor, Skims, also launched with a minimalist, monochrome aesthetic. “We had gone through a good chunk of time in a very bland, very neutral trend pattern. So whether that’s in intimate apparel, whether that’s in nail colors, whether that’s in the gray and beige of home interiors,” she observes. “And I think that maximalism and fun and joy and pushing it to the max, I just think that’s coming back and and I think we see that in our results.”
Her bet is that women are ready for maximalism again, and that there’s real demand for a place that feels fun. In a time of political whiplash, economic anxiety, and lingering culture‑war fatigue, she frames Victoria’s Secret as a kind of sparkly refuge. The goal, she says, is to be “a really uplifting place to escape to,” one that helps customers feel like the best version of themselves, not someone else’s fantasy. Sexy, in this universe, is a feeling, as could be seen at the 2025 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
Read the full feature to see how Super is trying to turn using that vision to power the “biggest transformation opportunity in retail”—and whether wings and rhinestones are enough to pull it off.
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